We are thrilled to announce that Katherine Frank’s In the Silence of the Heart: A Biography of Suicide has been picked up internationally. Translation rights have been sold to De Arbeiderspers (Holland), Hanser Verlag (Germany) and Guanda (Italy) by Lisette Verhagen of Susanna Lea Associates.

Katherine Frank lost her husband to suicide, a few decades later she attempts suicide herself. Having carried out extensive research on the topic, she is writing this, a definitive work on suicide. Combining this research with her personal account, In the Silence of the Heart will attempt to answer the sensitive question; why do people take their own lives? It will speak volumes to anyone who has been affected by the trauma of suicide and will appeal to readers of Siddhartha Mukherjee, David Foster Wallace, Sally Brampton, and Paul Kalanithi.

Arabella Pike at HarperCollins who will publish the book in the UK says:

‘I am thrilled and very proud to be publishing Katherine Frank’s mighty and important book In the Silence of the Heart: A Biography of Suicide. The book shares the scope of Siddartha Mukherjee’s Emperor of All Maladies as well as the emotional power and restraint of William Styron’s Darkness Visible, Matt Haig’s Reasons to Stay Alive or Kate Gross’s Late Fragments. Whilst Frank’s book is inspired by personal experience, the book is very much a biography of this controversial and much-misunderstood subject. She will draw upon her immense scholarship and thinking over decades to explore the phenomenon of those who choose the time of their own death. It is a subject that will never not be relevant.’